Over a Thousand Years in the Making: The Story of Morghew Park Estate

Most farms can trace their history back a few generations. Morghew Park Estate, sitting just outside Tenterden on the edge of the Kentish Weald, can trace its back to 968 AD - when its sale for 1,450 pence was personally approved by King Edgar, the first King of all England, and witnessed by Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury. The document recording that transaction has survived. Not many farms can say the same.

That remarkable continuity of purpose is, in many ways, the key to understanding Morghew today. The landscape it encompasses - traditional Wealden upland, with its small fields, hawthorn hedges and ancient oak trees, descending onto classic Romney Marsh-edge marshland with wider fields, dykes and willow beds - is not something that has been manufactured or curated. It has simply been farmed, managed and quietly tended across a very long span of time.

The estate covers approximately 2,000 acres, or three square miles, of unspoilt Kentish countryside. Included within that are around 200 acres of mature and ancient woodland, two reservoirs, several lakes, five miles of riverbank on two minor Kentish watercourses, and a working arable farm that produces everything from heritage potatoes and stoneground flour to cold-pressed rapeseed oil, wild game, firewood and vodka. It is also home to a remarkable range of wildlife - marsh harriers, reed buntings, early purple orchids and yellow wagtails among them - and is crossed by the Kent and East Sussex Railway, a heritage steam line whose trains still run through the estate as they have for well over a century.

Morghew is not a heritage attraction or a managed visitor experience. It is a working farm that happens to have been working, in one form or another, since before the Norman Conquest. The produce it sells - from its honesty stall off Smallhythe Road and online - is the direct result of that long, careful relationship with the land.

Find out more about Morghew Park Estate and explore their full range of produce here: https://morghew.com/